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When a user boots Windows is there a way to only show a single user that then asks for a password. For example, I have an admin user and a regular user. When the computer boots I do not want the user to see the admin account. Is this possible? If so, how would an admin then login?

I have Windows 7 if that matters.

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2 Answers 2

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Yes, it seems you can hide the account following guidelines explained at Microsoft Technet forums. However you can't login then unless you set the registry key back.

  1. Go to regedit
  2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
  3. On the left, right click on Winlogon, click New and click Key.
  4. Type SpecialAccounts and Enter.
  5. On the left, right click on SpecialAccounts, click New and click Key.
  6. Type UserList and Enter.
  7. In the right panel of UserList, right click on a empty area and click New then click DWORD (32bit) Value.
  8. Here, type in the name of the user you want to hide. You may have to experiment with that, I don't know how spaces or changed user names affect this.
  9. Right click on the user account name and click Modify.
  10. To hide the user account type 0 and click OK.

If you want to show it again you have to enter 1 instead of 0 at the last step.

Alternatively, you can see the answers from this post: "Hide account from login screen but can be used in UAC"

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    It would appear that this hides the Admin account completely not allowing for a standard user to get the password prompt for application installation. Once you reboot you can only login as a standard user and don't get the password prompt when installing applications or making system changes.
    – user201706
    Commented Feb 23, 2013 at 9:58
  • You can also hide any user you want from the control panel, there's no need to do all those registry edition tricks...
    – Stakhanov
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 9:02
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    @Stakhanov If you could post an answer explaining that, that'd be much appreciated.
    – slhck
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 9:03
  • ♦ I'm a bit rusty at the moment, its not from the control panel but the computer management console which is slightly different, you can trigger it by right clicking on "computer" in the start menu and select the computer manager, then there's a user and group management panel, in the user section you can edit most of the registered users properties including hiding those users. Edit : oh I'm sorry you're actully right we can't hide the users, only disable them, which is also slightly different, my bad...
    – Stakhanov
    Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 9:11
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Open a command prompt as administrator

net user administrator /active:no

To re-enable, do the same process but

net user administrator /active:yes

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